It may be an unpopular opinion, but I am not a huge fan of summer. We of the larger persuasion tend to run a little on the hot side on the best of days; when we hit those dog days of summer, it can get downright unbearable. Let’s talk about this summer and how I’m handling the omnipresent heat and humidity. Spoiler – not well.

(editor’s note: Apologies for the rambling that is occurring in this post. That’s the heat and lack of sleep hitting me when I wrote it!)

(Reader’s internal dialogue – “wait… he edited this hot mess? I can’t imagine what the original looked like!”)

A few days ago, our temperature reached a high of 36-degrees, with a feels-like temperature of 41-degrees. (Thanks Humidex!) That’s just over 105F for my American readers. Over the past few years, we seem to be getting more and more of these extreme heat days. For anyone familiar with the east coast of Canada, this is not what you would call seasonable temperatures. In the past, we might have a streak of 2-3 days in excess of 35-degrees over the summer. At the upper range, we’d have one week of extreme temperatures, generally at the end of July. We are currently on our third straight week of mid-to-high 30’s and we’re only mid-July. Add to that what feels like 217% humidity, and you’ve got some insufferably hot days (at least for me!)

The first week wasn’t too bad. We had high-30’s for our daytime high, but the temperature was still dropping considerably in the evening, so I was able to sleep comfortably. As the hot days dragged on, the overnight temperature hasn’t dropped as much as I would like. In the past week, I’ve had a number of near-sleepless nights. The second-floor bedroom of our townhouse is without air conditioning. We have a good quality fan in the bedroom, but when it’s just circulating hot air, it loses it’s effectiveness. The times I do sleep, I do so restlessly – waking often, drenched in sweat.

I’m used to a bit of insomnia from time to time, but when it drags on it becomes a nightmare. After two or three nights where I get a maximum of 3-3.5 hours of sleep (of course, also non-consecutively), I start to feel the effects during the day. I get cranky. My attitude drifts towards the negative. I get easily frustrated by things like the fact I’m not sleeping, that things are not going as I expected at work, by the endless cigarette smoke that wafts into my home thanks to my neighbours’ 12-17 cigarette breaks spread out over the day. There are days when I feel like I’m living in a movie from the 1950’s when every other character is lighting up.

That’s how I’ve been feeling the past few days. I get irritable, people annoy me, I don’t want to do anything. I truly feel like I’m going to go crazy at some points during the day. I get so tired, and want to sleep, but then I can’t, and it gets me feeling more frazzled. And by the lunch hour, my office is getting so warm and stuffy from the heat and humidity, that I’m sweating like a chilled glass of water in a hot room. (For shame! That was a terrible simile. You’re an English Lit. major!)

I have reprieve from the heat when I come downstairs to the kitchen and living room, but I also try to not have the A/C on too high because it them makes going upstairs, whether to work or to go to bed, all the more unsufferable. I’ve taken to dozing off in the living room at night so that I can get a good sleepiness going, then I pop upstairs and hope for the best! It’s had mixed results.

We have a few cold treats as well. We’ve got popsicles. Cans of Bubly and iced tea in the fridge. And of course our always-with-us insulated travel mugs full of cold, crisp water. These all help refresh me, but they are just Band-Aids on a gaping wound.

It was time to make a conscious choice to change all of this. Earlier this week while finishing up our lunch hour, my wife said, “I’m going to crush this afternoon.” In my sleep-deprived state, I first understood “I’m going to crash this afternoon,” and replied: “Me too!” But when I realized what she actually said, it got me to thinking. The next morning, I told myself that it was going to be a good day, and that I was going to crush it. So I made myself a strong cup of yerba mate tea, and got to work. I don’t entirely know if it was the highly caffeinated tea, the intention that I set, or a combo of both, but it was a really good workday.

The next morning, I told myself the same thing, sans tea. By late morning, I didn’t believe myself. And it showed. I was getting frustrated; I had a moment of frazzlement (is that a word?) and wanted to just shut down and run away. The lack-of-sleep and heat-induced feelings of dread and frustration were formenting again. (okay, so maybe the tea was a bigger part of my crushing it the day before.) Come lunch, I took a moment to stop and breathe. I told myself that things would be good and that I could still crush the afternoon. And I did. It goes to show that having a strong intention, and acting on it, drives results. (There’s the tiny moral in the story for anyone who made it this far.)

All this to say that I’m over the summer. This seemingly never-ending heat wave can take a hike and I’m more than ready for the cool autumn months to roll in.

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How is your summer shaping up? Do you tolerate the heat better than I do? Do you have any strategies or suggestions to combat the heat and the lack of sleep it’s causing me?